Royal Pains

To the left of this picture is Dr. Hank Lawson, main character on the only t.v. show I am watching this summer called Royal Pains (on USA). The storyline is based on him being a superstar ER doc in a worldclass hospital in Brooklyn(?). One day two cases come in at the same time, a young street kid with a severe heart problem, and a trustee that only needs a minor procedure. He (obviously) decides to spend time with the kid from the street who is dying, but in the meantime the trustee dies from a mistake made by some of the staff (I think, if my memory serves me correctly), and he is fired. He gets depressed, his fiance leaves him, and then his brother convinces him to go to the Hamptons for vacation. His brother's only intention is to just to crash all the parties of the filthy rich, but at the first one Hank manages to save someone, and he is hired by the richest of them all to be a concierge doctor...which means he makes house calls so these rich people don't have to go to the hospital and have their privacy violated. Despite the fact that he obviously doesn't really enjoy the lifestyle, he manages to do well for himself. He is kind of the Macgiver of medicine and knows an awful lot about random diagnoses. The medicine is very tv-ized and unrealistic at points though. The settings are of course all beautiful, set in these glitzy mansions on the beach with people driving Ferraris and whatnot.

However, as much as I like Hank's character, the only reason why I'm watching the show is because of the woman on the right, Divya, who is his PA! She has two main story lines as far as I can tell: #1 She's from a high class white collar family who thinks she's just a socialite/went to medical school and doesn't realize what she really does (this one hasn't been developed too much yet), but #2 is her struggle as a PA to have people get past the "assistant" part of her title and understand that she practices medicine. The show is very pro-PA, and the latest episode has her asserting herself as to what she can do, showing off her knowledge, and the character apologizing for doubting her abilities. During the first couple of episodes I was wondering if they were going to confuse her with a medical assistant though. One of their earliest cases she had called Hank to take out stitches in a kid, which is very doable by a PA. However I could see from a writer's standpoint they needed to get Hank some way to talk to the patient, so that is what they did. Overall though they are doing a great job in portraying what PAs do.